the screen. “You just seem weird.” And had, the whole time she was gone. Of course they had fought. And of course he didn’t like Food Wars. But none of that was new. This sense of distance was.
And he hadn’t argued; that was the thing. “Just go do the show, Mae. And I’ll see you—I mean, I’ll talk to you later. Everything’s fine.”
He hung up then, and if he’d planned to throw her off-balance, he’d succeeded. But she couldn’t think about Jay right now. She tugged at her shirt, making sure it wasn’t blousing too much over her skirt, and fished in her pocket for more lipstick. She looked like a rube; she just knew it.
She glanced over at Amanda, expecting to see the same doubts running across her face, but the sister who never wore makeup looked almost as good as the professionals.
Mae had expected to feel at ease—after all, she had done this before, and she’d certainly faced less appealing audiences under different circumstances—but instead, she felt as if she were shrinking. She felt fine in Mimi’s—she was killing it in Mimi’s. Planning with Andy, seamlessly trading shifts at the fryer, stepping out to greet everyone from her old chorus teacher to the guy who’d pumped gas at the Texaco throughout her whole childhood, she’d felt dropped right back into place but even more so, combining what she had learned about business and showmanship with what she had always known about running Mimi’s. But that confidence seemed to have come with a trade-off—here, she had become a supplicant.
The surroundings were right, but she was in the wrong place, in between a visibly nervous Andy and her mother, who had dressed for the occasion in her usual slacks and blouse covered with her usual smock. Mae, with an increasingly forced smile on her face, felt her inner churning speed up. What was she doing behind a platter of fried chicken on national television? This had been a terrible, stupid idea, one that would mark her as “not one of us” forevermore in the eyes of everyone who mattered—to her career, to her whole life.
How had she forgotten the cardinal rule of the makeover/remodel reality television genre—that you never want to be the one who needs help? She’d been fooled by the different format, but now here she was, the yokel in a roomful of pros. Jay had been right. This wasn’t going to help her career; it was going to destroy it.
At this auspicious moment in her thought process, the lights came on and Simon Rideaux addressed her.
“So, Mae, tell us what you have for us today.”
Mae stepped forward, feeling as if she ought to curtsy, and gave Andy what she hoped was an imperceptible tug; he set the platter in front of the three chefs.
“This is Mimi’s fried chicken, Chef. We use the same seasoning recipe Mimi used when she started Mimi’s in 1886 as a whistle-stop. Passengers on the train used to get off and buy her chicken and biscuits in a box lunch. Hers was so good that conductors would tell the passengers they liked best to skip the earlier stops and wait for Mimi’s.”
Now it was Andy’s turn. “We cook the chicken pretty much exactly like Mimi would have, in big cast-iron skillets, with a few concessions to modern taste.”
As expected, that caught the chefs’ attention. “What have you changed, then?” James Melville asked, his expression suggesting that truly authentic cooks at a truly authentic legacy restaurant would have altered nothing.
“Well, Mimi probably would have used pure lard, which is impractical today, although we do use a blend. And it’s likely she would never have changed the oil at all, just replenished it.”
Argue with that, James Melville, Mae thought. She’d watched hours of this guy to figure out what they could say that wouldn’t set him off on a “but real chefs do it this way” tirade, and what had felt like even more hours convincing Andy that he couldn’t just wing it.
Andy went on. “We start our oil up fresh every Saturday, and we do keep up one tradition we think sets the oil up right—we do a batch of doughnuts in it first thing Saturday morning.”
“That sounds delicious,” said Cary Catlin. “Are those on the menu?”
“Nope,” said Andy, sounding, just as they’d planned, very casual. “We just sell them to whoever stops by until we run out.”
Mae would bet Cary Catlin hadn’t eaten a doughnut in years, but she could see the plan